World's first open ledger for in-field agricultural data based on open source SatEO

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Nils Helset

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Entity (Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Co proposers and Additional applicants

Not applicable.

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

6

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

A fully open source and independent blockchain ledger of all agricultural production data from any given agricultural field in Kenya.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

Not applicable.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

The project intends to build an open source system, starting with geo-location of a particular agricultural field boundary where the entire agricultural ecosystem and stakeholders can contribute data and information, including crop type, production volume, crop input applied, credit rating, the objective here is to connect the entire ecosystem to one given field, this will enable transparency in the industry and will enable significant advanced in traceability and sustainability assessment and ultimately help farmers optimise their production, saving costs and increasing revenue through additional revenue streams (carbon, water, soil credits). Additionally, this premise is built on that any farmer and their field boundaries will have a unique, decentralised digital identity which can be used across entire ecosystems to benefit the farmer and relevant stakeholders.

[METADATA] SDG rating

Smallholder farmers face significant challenges worldwide, including improper infrastructure, lack of funding, gender biases and economic difficulties. The broader agricultural value chain system has been developed in a way that the farmer has been marginalised and left with no real options of escaping economic hardship. This project will revolutionise how we can help smallholder farmers own their own data, independently from the supply chain, and use this data to negotiate better financing, crop-input supply and insurance (among other) terms, this will give farmers more control, autonomy, power and control and be able to leverage this towards the broader system operators. The wider societal impacts of our solution includes alignment to UN’s Sustainable Development Goals including: 2. Zero Hunger through contributing towards “achieving food security and improved nutrition and promoting sustainable agriculture”, 1. No Poverty through helping low-income farmers (smallholder markets) build preventive actions against “climate-related extreme events”, 15. Life on land: through contributing to “halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss”, 13. Climate change: enabling farmers (end-users) to reduce use of chemical fertilizer/crop protection and Co2 emissions and 8. Decent Work and Economic Growth: enabling farmers (cereal-producers) to optimize their operations, i.e. save costs and increase economic productivity.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution.

The solution will provide one central place, fully independent and open source on blockchain ledger which is open to community and all stakeholders to view all data for any given agricultural field boundary in Kenya. Currently, fragmentation and lack of universal standards (formats) makes it incredibly difficult and challenging to collect all data in one place, due to machinery OEM manufacturers and FMS/FMIS have closed systems with their own data and formats for any given agricultural field. We want to entirely change this approach and be able to develop one central place which is open and can collect, process and provide actionable insights to not only the farmer but also for the entire supply chain, grain traders, insurance, banks, crop input producers and suppliers, agronomists etc. This would revolutionise how we share data in the agricultural space, starting with smallholder farmers in Kenya, who are extensively marginalised.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community.

The solution will address the following sections of the challenge:

• National governance systems - New governance systems for nation states
• Climate Change - Solutions that help to solve environmental issues
• Business solutions - Software products, data management, process management, data management solutions (CRM, ERP etc), privacy products.
• Artificial intelligence

Furthermore, the solution will provide a baseline or blueprint for how to develop services and tools that will help the value chain through the decentralised community and block chain ledger, i.e. every agricultural field will have it's unique identifier and every piece of data point for that field will be connected with the ID, enabling a massive multiplier effect for collecting, standardising the data for farmers and ecosystem, which has been a major challenge for the last few decades in ag, as it's generally controlled by larger organisations depicting the structure, the idea is to take back centralised control and provide individual farmers the power to make decisions and influence the broader ag value chain, not the other way around.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

DigiFarm has successfully demonstrated it's internal capacity to successfully achieve KPIs in the project funded in Fund 8 "Open ledger for agricultural land" (Idea #18354) and was highlighted recently selected as one of the projects spotlighted amongst the recently completed 500 Catalyst projects and presented during the Town Hall (12.07.2023).

Additionally, DigiFarm’s team is the ideal fit for the project as our core team has extensive experience in (a) developing agricultural technology for crop-monitoring using AI and remote sensing (Satellite data) to the agribusinesses market (B2B/B2G) using SaaS-models. Successfully built commercial agricultural technological solutions using remote sensing (Satellite-data) and AI across 100 million hectares: >90% accuracy in crop Detection and >85% accuracy in yield-prediction in soybean and corn (US/Brazil) (b) core team has over 15+ years of on-the-ground crop-producing (farming) experience and close partnership withs Felleskjøpet (largest ag-coop in Norway, NLR (Norwegian Agricultural Advisory Organisation) and University of Life Sciences (NMBU) (c) commercial and corporate Ag-market: over 20+ years combined corporate agriculture leadership experience (d) over 40+ experience in agronomy academic research internationally.

Additional qualifications in DigiFarm’s core team and founders (10) include technical and agronomical experience: (a) over 40 years combined international work experience in precision-Ag projects in Canada, USA, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Australia, Russia and Ukraine (b) successfully filed 5 patents (AI-based technologies) in agriculture/biology (e) developed technology for Zoner.ag (one of first geospatial web-platforms for analyzing agricultural fields) successfully acquired by Bayer to become the geospatial engine of Xarvio digital-farming platform (owned by BASF). Management capacity: led and managed the Bayer CropScience division as Global Technology Lead with the Digital Farming Division, overseeing expansion Xarvio to over 100 employees, serving over 3.4 million farmers and agronomists worldwide (b) founded and grew AI-based Gamaya (Swiss-based) agtech startup, managed team growth to 45 employees in under 24 months and secured $20 million in VC funding from Mahindra.

[Project Milestones] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

The frist milestone in this project (M1-M3) will consist of:

1. Successfully developed the technical framework for interpreting input data for any given agricultural field (in Kenya) into a universal standard and format linked to the unique field ID and the associated block-chain ledger, this will include development of APIs and integration end points.
2. Successfully developed the front-end interface for inputting data for stakeholders, i.e. this will also rely on the automatically delineated field boundaries from Idea #26780, the web-application will be able to collect and convert data in our DB to match #1.

The acceptance criteria in this milestone will be successful development of the solution for both 1 and 2 and prototyped this to the broader Cardano community to leverage and build additional services and tools on top of, providing the fundamental baseline and blue print.

The second milestone in this project (M3-M6) will consist of:

1. Successfully conversion and implementation of input data such as crop type, volume production, fertiliser, seed and crop protection applied in a particular season (quantities/dates), seeding date, harvesting date, machinery data, soil samples, yield data, weather (if available), credit rating, historical prices for grain (from ag-trader) in our database and displayed on the front-end interface as well as in the ledger for all the data for any given unique field ID.
2. Successfully tested with over 1,000 data points across the Kenyan data set within 6 months.

The acceptance criteria in this milestone will be successful development/integration of the input sources listed above.

The final milestone in this project will be:

1. Successful completion and validation that the technology and solution works and can function on it's own independently
2. Successful buy in from Cardano community to leverage data for further advancing project
3. Successful completion of 1,000 data points per field in any given growing season processed within milliseconds will also validate the technical solution

The extension of this concept as its still an idea is to be able to create a solution for this concept in the next stage where this can scale and become the Oracle for agricultural decentralisation in smallholder markets and eventually worldwide.

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Additional qualifications in DigiFarm’s core team and founders (10) include technical and agronomical experience: (a) over 40 years combined international work experience in precision-Ag projects in Canada, USA, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Australia, Russia and Ukraine (b) successfully filed 5 patents (AI-based technologies) in agriculture/biology (e) developed technology for Zoner.ag (one of first geospatial web-platforms for analyzing agricultural fields) successfully acquired by Bayer to become the geospatial engine of Xarvio digital-farming platform (owned by BASF). Management capacity: led and managed the Bayer CropScience division as Global Technology Lead with the Digital Farming Division, overseeing expansion Xarvio to over 100 employees, serving over 3.4 million farmers and agronomists worldwide (b) founded and grew AI-based Gamaya (Swiss-based) agtech startup, managed team growth to 45 employees in under 24 months and secured $20 million in VC funding from Mahindra.

• Nils Helset, 15th generation farmer in Norway. Extensive experience with precision agriculture services and agronomy - over 8 years experience in crop-producing, managing over 40k decares of pilot farmers with Felleskjøpet. Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilshelset/
• Konstantin Varik - built advanced AI models in agriculture using remote sensing for over 8 years including AI model for crop-yield prediction for maize and soybeans for USA, Brazil and Argentina with 98-99% yield-prediction accuracy 1-1.5 months prior to harvesting (data provided to the USDA). Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/varik/
• Alex Melnichouck founded B2B ag-tech startups Zoner.ag in 2012 (acquired by BASF in 2015), led and managed the global BASF digital farming team for over 4 years. Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-melnitchouck-8977a522/
• Yosef Akhtman founded and grew Gamaya, Swiss-based ag-tech startup focused on remote sensing and AI funded by Mahindra. Yosef is a scientist and inventor with over 5 registered patents in agriculture and biology. Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akhtman

It is also important to mention here that DigiFarm is a fully independent Norwegian organisation, we have not raised any VC capital and are fully bootstrapped since 2019, this approach and independence makes us an ideal fit for this project.

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

The project timeline is estimated to be 6 months which will enable us to run the feasibility analysis and validation of the technical solution from an engineering point of a view as well as the block-chain ledger process and broader community up-take within Cardano to support and contribute to the project, as this is a concept which requires extensive community contribution, DigiFarm can not do this project on it's own as it's an incredibly complex and challenging project to get right, but if we do it becomes the standard which can be adapted across multiple ecosystems.

The external services we will leverage includes:

1. AWS cloud environment
2. Github/Tensorflow in addition to other software/PM tools
3. Local partners in Kenya for collecting data and piloting with farmers
4. We will also be leveraging third party services for putting the data on blockchain, we already have existing partnerships in the Cardano ecosystem to support this

Hosting for the project website and code repositories are provided free of charge via Github. Community outreach will be done via (free) Linkedin, Facebook and YouTube accounts along with Project Catalyst communication channels.

Detailed roadmap above for descriptions of the tasks and work products that will be delivered in three, four-week sprints

• Month 1-3: 200 hours x $65 (175 ADA) = $13,000 and 35,000 ADA
• Month 3-6: 150 hours x $65 (175 ADA) = $9,750 and 26,250 ADA
• SUBTOTAL: $22,750 and 61,250 ADA
• plus 10% project management and office expenses: $2,275 and 6,125 ADA

TOTAL: $25,025 and 67,375 ADA

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

The value for money for the Cardano ecosystem is significant as the concept is to build a open/developer platform essentially for enabling further development of use-cases and value directly linked into digitisation, independence and decentralisation for farmers in marginalised communities, specifically starting with Kenya. The ability to provide an open source ledger for further development specifically targeted at the Cardano ecosystem should be embraced and supported.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agrees to Fund Rules and also that data in the submission form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept